NOVANEWS
Avi Shlaim is relatively sound on Israeli political history and pretty unsound on quite a few other things, among them Zionism, a solution to the conflict, and the Nakba. Although The Iron Wall is a pretty good book, I consider him something close to providing flak for the Zionist entity. In that respect, I just finished reading Shlaim’s recent article on The Hill, “Obama and Israel: The pessimistic perspective a couple days ago.” The article gets everything wrong—Shlaim’s mind is not a sharp cutting instrument. He starts by taking standard IR analytical units, nation-states, and tells his readers in Washington, D.C. that the “American-Israeli special relationship is a classic example of the tail that wags the dog.” These terms obscure more than they reveal, in part because they treat as a bundle a set of policies whose drivers vary depending on the range of their effects.
It’d be one thing to discuss undue Zionist influence on American policy-making vis-a-vis the Israel-Palestine conflict in a local newspaper. It’s quite another to blunder into the debate in a Capitol Hill house organ, where that kind of talk will have no plausible effect whatsoever–Shlaim writes as though policy-makers simply need to be coaxed with a bunch of rusty cliches into a better understanding of the “national interest.”
He is right to say that “Peace talks that go nowhere slowly provide Israel with just the cover it needs to pursue its relentlessly expansionist agenda on the West Bank,” but silly to say that “America has lost all credibility in the eyes not only of the Palestinians but of the wider Arab and Muslim worlds”—first, America doesn’t care about its credibility; second, the collaborator regimes in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etcetera putter smoothly along going along with American policies of neo-liberal capitalism in the context of maximizing oil profits for the oil majors and ensuring the sale of high-tech junk to the Arab states; third, the “peace process” has been in full-throttle since 1990 and as long as it can keep on processing, the imperialist-Zionist-capitalist domination of the Near East can continue apace, while the Arab dictators can claim that they are “pushing for peace,” the better to tamp down unrest amongst their populations and delay the inevitable revolutions.
Shlaim goes on to write, with colonialist aplomb, “A just settlement means a two-state solution, the emergence of an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital city in East Jerusalem. Only America can push Israel into such a settlement. It has the leverage but it has not exercised it. America gives Israel money, arms, and advice. Israel takes the money, takes the arms, and ignores the advice.” This is not the place for purity tests but a two-state “solution” is not just, although it is not unimaginable that it’s a way-station on the road to justice.
Anyway, “America” does not give Israel money, nor does America give Israel “money”: it routes American taxpayer money through the Israeli territory, where it lands back in the American military-industrial complex, with 25 percent of it “allowed” to stay in “Israel” where it contributes to building up the “Israeli” defense-industrial base, most of which is listed on American stock-changes and owned by American or Israeli-American investors.
Shlaim notes that “Barack Obama’s election was widely expected to usher in a more even-handed policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—by who? Never mind, distract us with a cutesy aside: “However, to use an American phrase, he is better at talking the talk than at walking the walk.” Shlaim writes, “Obama had three showdowns with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on this critical issue but he backed down each time. Why did the most powerful man in the world allow himself to be defeated and humiliated by his junior partner?
The answer must lie, to a large extent, in the persistent power of the Israel lobby in the United States,” finally getting something partially correct: the settlements are an internal Israeli matter, and the Lobby conveys the Israeli reasons to refuse to halt settlement building to the corridors of power in Washington, where American policy duly reflects the policy of its ally.
That last word is key. The Lobby is the force that pushes for American government acquiescence to settlement building. But it gets that acquiescence, in spite of the fact that other sectors of power wish otherwise, because it provides services to American and global capital, keeping the Middle East destabilized, with high oil prices ensuring maximal profits for oil majors, those same oil profits wending their way into the coffers of the arms companies, and all of it tied up nicely with the Israeli-Gulf Cooperation Council push for the Middle East Free Trade Area, meant to ensure the dominance of neoliberal capitalism in the Middle East.
The dictatorships are happy to play along with this game, so long as they get what they want out of it: to remain dictatorships, a confluence of interest with Israel which needs either dictatorships or destabilized states in the region in order to continue to repress the Palestinians. Analysis that insists on missing the regional context, or worse, claims that to do so is to shift the blame from the Lobby or Israel onto an amorphous metaphysical imperialism, is like physiological analysis that insists on staring intently at a human lung trying to discern its function independent of the human body in which it does its work.
Shlaim writes that “Obama’s position is pusillanimous and, for a superpower, indescribably feeble. Instead of leaning on the stronger party, he presses the weaker party to make more and more concessions. Under these conditions, the prospects of a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are close to zero. With Obama in charge of the so-called peace process, there is no light at the end of the tunnel, only more illegal settlements, and consequently more strife, more violence, more bloodshed, and ultimately a third intifada,” which may indeed be true, but it’s not clear what those pushing for a one-state solution want from Obama.
Certainly, he was never going to emplace such a solution, so why obsess over the humiliation of a man with the blood of tens of thousands all over his hands? (Oddly Chomsky used similar rhetoric here; as leftists we should consistently want our war criminal presidents to be humiliated; in fact, we should despise them).
Shlaim tells us that “The damage that Israel causes to American interests is incalculable. During the Cold War Israel was a strategic asset for America. Today it is a political, diplomatic, and strategic liability,” a banal bit of bullshit that should disqualify Shlaim from ever being referred to as a leftist in polite circles ever again. The “Cold War” ending means very little for American empire, which moves merrily along to the next excuse for constant intervention—now it’s terrorism—while “America” has no interests; rather, classes within America have interests, inflected by Zionism.
So yes, Jewish money disproportionately funds the parties, and that probably plays a role in how Israel was constructed and constructed itself as an imperial asset in the 1948-1967 period, a story that has yet to be adequately told, but nonetheless, capital does just fine with an Israeli dog running wild in the Middle East. Despite Shlaim’s nonsense about the “American national interest,” he finally and fleetingly gets on track when he writes that “the argument that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank serves the American national interest is simply preposterous”; quite right, but it’s important to figure out why that occupation endures with American support, and the Lobby does not provide a sufficient answer to that question, although it should not be ignored, as some like Zunes tend to do.
An “incalculable” amount of damage should be easy to prove, but what does Shlaim put in front of us? “As CENTROM commander, General David Petraeus, told Congress, Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is jeopardizing U.S. standing in the entire region. And as Vice President Joe Biden reportedly told Netanyahu: ‘What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.’” So Shlaim wants us to take a stand against occupation so imperial managers can cluster-bomb brown people more effectively in Iraq (Shlaim is of Iraqi extraction, which makes this paragraph not merely idiotic but actually disgusting, shilling for American empire while arguing for bombing his own people).
The security of the troops matters to me, which is why I say bring them home; failing that, at least buy them armor for their humvees. But the empire’s managers don’t care about the safety of our troops. Why should they, when they’ll never serve and they continue with the policies that make it ever-more alluring to join the US military as heartland-industry has been hollowed out and exported? Shlaim concludes that “The basic problem is that Israel is a domestic issue in the US, not a foreign policy one”; but all foreign policy is domestic, and it all relates to the central and structuring social system in this country: capitalism, in which the Special Relationship is a whirring cog, lubricated by the Lobby. Both should be destroyed, I agree with Shlaim on that, but not a whole lot else here.
Technorati Tags: Avi Shlaim, Gaza, Israel, occupation, Palestine, the lobby
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